Bear Valley Mountain Resort

Our coordinator as horrible. She did not plan well. She was not up at the ceremony site, we had to call her while trying to get everything coordinated. She would take weeks to get back to us via email.

Bear Valley is an incredibly beautiful place and we really loved the venue, both for the ceremony (at the overlook) and the reception (the lodge). Unfortunately, the staff just does not operate with much professionalism and ultimately, we can't recommend them because of this. The entirety of the planning process was frustrating, as we either didn't receive information we needed, got inaccurate information, or had to say the same thing multiple times and make corrections at every step. The ultimate mistake occurred during our actual wedding reception when an entire course of dinner was not served (dessert), which was in writing as part of the plan. Unfortunately, BV (and specifically Mariah, the contact), told us this mistake was due to a "miscommunication" and refused to refund us the price of dessert. If you have time to micromanage them, or a really detail oriented planner that can monitor everything the day of, it might be worth it, but otherwise, we would not recommend. As an aside, the food for our rehearsal dinner was excellent (pork chop, 40 people), but wedding dinner (chicken, 90 people) was really disappointing. It's unclear if this was due to the meal selection or just the scaling up, but the entree was really dry/hard and I fear had sat out for a long time.

My brother got married here and we all had an awesome weekend!! I know they were planning from afar and the staff went above and beyond to take care of them leading up to the day of the event. The space was beautiful and the view at the ceremony was amazing. Food was delicious, the staff were awesome, I can't say enough.... if you are looking for a mountain view at a beautiful rustic venue, this is the place to get married!!

I am a professional wedding planner and assisted my sister in planning her wedding at Bear Valley Resort in August 2018. It was an absolute nightmare to work with the event planning staff at this lodge. For the sake of brevity, I will only highlight the most major issues in this review. I will also include the short list of positive features. The bride and groom signed their venue contract and flew out from Boston for their complimentary 1 night’s stay at the lodge to do a menu tasting and meet with the venue coordinator. They communicated their preferred date to come out, and it was confirmed with the coordinator. They arrived to a closed lodge, and no coordinator in sight. They found a night guard who contacted the manager who knew nothing about the planned visit. The couple ended up having to stay in the cloesed lodge alone, didn’t get to do a tasting because the kitchen was closed, and the coordinator never showed up. The couple would have cancelled this venue if they could have, but the contract and deposit had already been in effect, and it would have been difficult to find a new venue with only a few months to go before the wedding. The lodge did end up refunding the couple for their flight. The couple experienced an astounding lack of communication for the entire year leading to the wedding. It seems there was always a change of event staff which I’m sure did not help with the communication issue, but the bride and groom would sometimes go 3-5 weeks without a response to questions. This was a huge problem especially when the wedding was only a few months away and we had time sensitive questions. The seemingly revolving managers were sometimes helpful and sometimes not. The most recent manager we worked with called the clients “penny pinchers” instead of attempting to provide explanations when they asked why a gratuity charge was being applied to things like the use of the mountain ceremony site and chair rentals. The manager also would not honor the catering prices they were quoted for and the bride and groom ended up having to pay much more for basic menu items than originally quoted for. The bride was supposed to have a meeting with the day-if coordinators the day before the wedding to go over some decor they were in charge of, and they did not show up and when contacted, said they weren’t going to come anymore and could just go over things on the phone instead. Positives: everything on the day of the wedding ended up running smoothly. The rest of the lodge staff (front desk, cleaners, bartenders, servers, etc. ) were all very nice, accommodating and professional.